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Yes, I realize I’m not supposed to risk offending my audience (if any), or my potential audience (if any). But some ideas are more important than my success (if any), so although proselytizing isn’t likely to win me friends or fans, I’m not sure I’d be very happy with myself if I didn’t disgorge the lump of disgust that’s set up shop in my gullet.

Although there is nothing new or profound in this observation, I find it deeply discouraging that the great majority of the shows on television (and the music on the radio) exist for a single reason: to create or increase wealth. There is little (if any) interest in art or truth or ideas or any of those slippery concepts that demand of the audience something more than somnolent complacency. These shows sell themselves the way our politicians do: by giving people precisely what they have been conditioned to think they want, by manipulating them like marionettes, by making them feel good (about themselves, their reliable little worlds, life’s intrinsic fairness, etc.), or excited (when they’ve allowed their own lives to become empty and dull), or smart (I knew he did it) or by misdirecting them just enough to make them lose track of the fact that there’s not a hint of truth or logic in this reprocessed lard and then satisfying them with what appears to be a clever surprise but which is really just a desperate attempt to keep them awake and drooling through the commercials, sometimes by frightening them so they can feel their hearts beat (I’m alive!) and then be comforted by the knowledge that their lives aren’t nearly that scary, by making the ingestion of their recycled swill easy and familiar and as momentarily satisfying as a dozen cocaine-encrusted, opium-filled donuts.

And the music is produced with the same lofty goal, the guilty parties rarely placing a timid, pedicured toe outside the accepted boundaries, adding thin synthetic noise to the same pedestrian chord progressions, rudimentary rhythms and juvenile melodies, repeating the same dull clichés over and over again until it’s all we want to hear, all we can hear, telling the same stories and pulling the same strings so often that are unable to make sense of anything else, so droningly often that we’ve lost the intellectual and emotional muscles required to process and appreciate anything honest, real, or, heaven forfend, complex or challenging, until we are no longer actively ingesting; we are being force-fed, and we, now as pliable and acquiescent as fresh corpses, are allowing it. And worst of all we are passing it on like a genetic flaw.

I won’t claim that all the malefactors responsible for the fabrication of this skull-Drano are aware that they are sugaring our brains to the point of numbness and atrophy. Some of them may simply be blank-eyed, drug-addled products of the same conditioning they are now purveying, but it doesn’t really matter. If we, as allegedly sentient adults, are weary of thinking, have given up the desire to learn, grow, work, struggle, experience, because life is just too damned hard or we’re too busy or too tired and it requires too much of us, it is still criminally irresponsible to deprive our children of life’s potential richness, richness of thought, of experience, of feeling.

I will avoid the potential discomfort of judging my own work in the light of these beliefs, but I can state with a clear conscience that my desire, at least, is to create something true and valuable. If the results fail to meet that objective, it’s not because my motivation is suspect; it is because I’m just not good enough.

Ways of Leaving

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Grant Jarrett

Chase Stoller is a beautifully mangled all-American mess. Jarrett’s ability to paint a picture of the tedium of small town America, and then to drop a character into this (Hannah) that’s right out of a Wyeth painting, well that sealed the deal for me. With pitch perfect dialogue and writing that felt like a perfect Indian summer day, "Ways Of Leaving" was that rare book that when I read the last word on the last page…I went back to page 1 and read it all over again.

Paul Hoppe, author of "The Curse of Van Gogh"

Grant Jarrett

Chase Stoller is a beautifully mangled all-American mess. Jarrett’s ability to paint a picture of the tedium of small town America, and then to drop a character into this (Hannah) that’s right out of a Wyeth painting, well that sealed the deal for me. With pitch perfect dialogue and writing that felt like a perfect Indian summer day, "Ways Of Leaving" was that rare book that when I read the last word on the last page…I went back to page 1 and read it all over again.

Paul Hoppe, author of "The Curse of Van Gogh"

Grant Jarrett

It’s official: Grant Jarrett has created the most entertaining, existential anti-hero since Tony Soprano. Whether you’re laughing out loud or wincing in recognition, "Ways of Leaving" will impress you with its raw honesty, keen writing, and ultimately, its big heart.

Grant Jarrett's vividly-drawn characters, dark humor and empathetic voice build bridges that transport the reader through this inter-generational story of parents and siblings in which the desire for salvation is challenged by the equally powerful impulse for destruction. "Ways of Leaving" depicts a seemingly familiar world that becomes freshly discovered and understood in Jarrett's intricate telling.

[Ways of Leaving] is a tour de force by a highly skilled author who has had the integrity and skill to examine the human condition for what it is and yet still rejoice about it.

Seannachie

Amazon.co.uk

Grant Jarrett

A first-rate, deeply insightful, moving and painfully honest examination of human life which is also excruciatingly funny...

Seannachie

Amazon.co.uk

Grant Jarrett

It is the final scene that will literally take your breath away.

Barbara

Web

Grant Jarrett

... an outstanding and devastating new novel ...

Independent Publisher

Grant Jarrett

... as heartbreaking as anything you will read in a novel this year.

Independent Publisher

Grant Jarrett

... a master class of fiction writing ...

Independent Publisher

Grant Jarrett

"Acts of searing violence transform vulnerable lives in Grant Jarrett’s The Half-Life of Remorse. Through the anguished accounts of survivors who nearly died in that night of violence, and the delusions of one of the survivors who imagines himself capable of magic, Jarrett creates echoes of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. This resonant novel traces the lingering effects of trauma and exposes the greatest challenge for its primary characters: self-forgiveness."

Lee Upton, author of The Tao of Humiliation

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About Grant

The fourth of five sons, I was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania to two emotionally scarred, terminally incompatible parents. From the moment we could say ouch...More